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Hail native language, that by sinews weak Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak, And mad'st imperfect words with childish trips, Half unpronounc'd, slide through my infant lips, Driving dumb Silence from the portal door, Where he had mutely sate two years before: Here I salute thee and thy pardon ask, That now I use thee in my latter task: Small loss it is that thence can come unto thee, I know my tongue but little grace can do thee: Thou needst not be ambitious to be first, Believe me I have thither pack'd the worst: And, if it happen as I did forecast, The daintest dishes shall be serv'd up last. I pray thee then deny me not thy aid For this same small neglect that I have made: But haste thee straight to do me once a pleasure, And from thy wardrobe bring thy chiefest treasure; Not those new-fangled toys, and trimming slight Which takes our late fantastics with delight, But cull those richest robes, and gay'st attire Which deepest spirits, and choicest wits desire. I have some naked thoughts that rove about And loudly knock to have their passage out; And weary of their place do only stay Till thou hast deck'd them in thy best array; That so they may without suspect or fears Fly swiftly to this fair assembly's ears. Yet I had rather, if I were to choose, Thy service in some graver subject use, Such as may make thee search thy coffers round, Before thou clothe my fancy in fit sound: Such where the deep transported mind may soar Above the wheeling poles, and at heav'n's door Look in, and see each blissful deity How he before the thunderous throne doth lie, Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings To th'touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings Immortal nectar to her kingly sire; Then passing through the spheres of watchful fire, And misty regions of wide air next under, And hills of snow and lofts of piled thunder, May tell at length how green-ey'd Neptune raves, In heav'n's defiance mustering all his waves; Then sing of secret things that came to pass When beldam Nature in her cradle was; And last of kings and queens and heroes old, Such as the wise Demodocus once told In solemn songs at king Alcinous' feast, While sad Ulysses' soul and all the rest Are held with his melodious harmony In willing chains and sweet captivity.

Below the gardens and the darkening pines The living water sinks among the stones, Sinking yet foaming till the snowy tones Merge with the fog drawn landward in dim lines. The cloud dissolves among the flowering vines, And now the definite mountain-side disowns The fluid world, the immeasurable zones. Then white oblivion swallows all designs. But still the rich confusion of the sea, Unceasing voice, sombre and solacing, Rises through veils of silence past the trees; In restless repetition bound, yet free, Wave after wave in deluge fresh releasing An ancient speech, hushed in tremendous ease.

Who wielded the chisel at the left portal, south porch, the scene of Theo chained, naked to the waist, leaning in to the brutal hand of what looks to be an even younger boy? What man carved stone to mimic flesh as it would look inside the torture of its flensing? How he must have held the scene in his own mind, thought it back to the act itself, modeling the lines with his own limbs so he would know both how a body bends in pain, and how a hand extends the flayer’s rake.

1 Is this writing mine Whose name is this Did I underline What I was to miss? 2 An upheaval of leaves Enlightens the tree Rooted it receives Gusts on a spree 3 Beauty makes me sad Makes me grieve I see what I must leave 4 Scaffold, gallows Do whose will Who hallows wood To build, kill 5 Blind man, anvil No hammer strikes Your eyes are spikes

The sea here used to look As if many convicts had built it, Standing deep in their ankle chains, Ankle-deep in the water, to smite The land and break it down to salt. I was in this bog as a child When they were all working all day To drive the pilings down. I thought I saw the still sun Strike the side of a hammer in flight And from it a sea bird be born To take off over the marshes. As the gray climbs the side of my head And cuts my brain off from the world, I walk and wish mainly for birds, For the one bird no one has looked for To spring again from a flash Of metal, perhaps from the scratched Wedding band on my ring finger. Recalling the chains of their feet, I stand and look out over grasses At the bridge they built, long abandoned, Breaking down into water at last, And long, like them, for freedom Or death, or to believe again That they worked on the ocean to give it The unchanging, hopeless look Out of which all miracles leap.

O Hesper-Phosphor, far away Shining, the first, the last white star, Hear’st thou the strange, the ghostly cry, That moan of an ancient agony From purple forest to golden sky Shivering over the breathless bay? It is not the wind that wakes with the day; For see, the gulls that wheel and call, Beyond the tumbling white-topped bar, Catching the sun-dawn on their wings, Like snow-flakes or like rose-leaves fall, Flutter and fall in airy rings; And drift, like lilies ruffling into blossom Upon a golden lake’s unwrinkled bosom. Are not the forest’s deep-lashed fringes wet With tears? Is not the voice of all regret Breaking out of the dark earth’s heart? She too, she too, has loved and lost; and we— We that remember our lost Arcady, Have we not known, we too, The primal greenwood’s arch of blue, The radiant clouds at sunrise curled Around the brows of the golden world; The marble temples, washed with dew, To which with rosy limbs aflame The violet-eyed Thalassian came, Came pitiless, only to display How soon the youthful splendour dies away; Came, only to depart Laughing across the gray-grown bitter sea? For each man’s life is earth’s epitome, And though the years bring more than aught they take, Yet might his heart and hers well break Remembering how one prayer must still be vain, How one fair hope is dead, One passion quenched, one glory fled, With those first loves that never come again. How many, how many generations, Have heard that sigh in the dawn, When the dark earth yearns to the unforgotten nations And the old loves withdrawn, Old loves, old lovers, wonderful and unnumbered As waves on the wine-dark sea, ’Neath the tall white towers of Troy and the temples that slumbered; In Thessaly? From the beautiful palaces, from the miraculous portals, The swift white feet are flown! They were taintless of dust, the proud, the peerless Immortals As they sped to their loftier throne! Perchance they are there, earth dreams, on the shores of Hesper, Her rosy-bosomed Hours, Listening the wild fresh forest’s enchanted whisper, Crowned with its new strange flowers; Listening the great new ocean’s triumphant thunder On the stainless unknown shore, While that perilous queen of the world’s delight and wonder Comes white from the foam once more. When the mists divide with the dawn o’er those glittering waters, Do they gaze over unoared seas— Naiad and nymph and the woodland’s rose-crowned daughters And the Oceanides? Do they sing together, perchance, in that diamond splendour, That world of dawn and dew, With eyelids twitching to tears and with eyes grown tender, The sweet old songs they knew, The songs of Greece? Ah, with harp-strings mute do they falter As the earth like a small star pales? When the heroes launch their ship by the smoking altar Does a memory lure their sails? Far, far away, do their hearts resume the story That never on earth was told, When all those urgent oars on the waste of glory Cast up its gold? Are not the forest fringes wet With tears? Is not the voice of all regret Breaking out of the dark earth’s heart? She too, she too, has loved and lost; and though She turned last night in disdain Away from the sunset-embers, From her soul she can never depart; She can never depart from her pain. Vainly she strives to forget; Beautiful in her woe, She awakes in the dawn and remembers.

To lie on a beach after looking at old poems: how slow untroubled by any grouch of mine or yours, Father Ocean tumbles in the bay alike with solitary divers, cripples, yelling girls and pipestem kids. He does what suits us all; and somewhere — there, out there, where the high tight sails are going — he wears a white death flag of foam for us, far out, for when we want it. So on Gea’s breast, the broad nurse who bears with me, I think of adolescence: that sad boy I was, thoughts crusted with ice on the treadmill of self-love, Narcissus damned, who yet brought like a coal in a hallow stalk, the seed of fire that runs through my veins now. I praise that sad boy now, who having no hope, did not blow out his brains.

Pattern or absence of pattern, the way a jet flies into blankness yet leaves a clear trail, I expect time to reveal an underdrawing, hatching of shadows, some rough plan visible through another spectrum of light. Once, at an ophthalmologist’s office, through an accident of mirrors, I saw the interior of my own eye, the retina’s veins like roots or a web, and then again ten years later, this time in an astronomy book—galaxies, clusters of galaxies, superclusters of galaxies strung out strands of a cosmic web, the redness of that image, the light extending like roots 13 billion years in every direction. Michelangelo could see a figure in a block of stone, waiting to be freed. I want his vision when I look in a mirror, his mathematical principles for depicting space, his ability to translate three dimensions into stone. First I’m in two dimensions, a photograph glued to the glass; then three—I’m somewhere between the glass and the background. All my houses, friends come and gone. How would he sculpt me? How far out of the stone have I come?

The lilacs lift in generous bloom Their plumes of dear old-fashioned flowers; Their fragrance fills the still old house Where left alone I count the hours. High in the apple-trees the bees Are humming, busy in the sun,— An idle robin cries for rain But once or twice and then is done. The Sunday-morning quiet holds In heavy slumber all the street, While from the church, just out of sight Behind the elms, comes slow and sweet The organ’s drone, the voices faint That sing the quaint long-meter hymn— I somehow feel as if shut out From some mysterious temple, dim And beautiful with blue and red And golden lights from windows high, Where angels in the shadows stand And earth seems very near the sky. The day-dream fades—and so I try Again to catch the tune that brings No thought of temple nor of priest, But only of a voice that sings.

A dirigible powered us through the first leg, traversing snow-capped mountains where goats leapt from crags, and men with wrinkled apples faces looked up, pointed. Smiling to cold air, I slept under a bear skin, touched your lips in the night. On our pleasant soap bubble journey, we dropped baskets down each morning, hooked meats, cheeses; in later weeks, nothing. Still, we took notes, detailing the weather conditions, the migrating elk numbers and their steady decrease. Northward by cracked compass, the sleet sheeting the balloon drove us low, then lower— In time we cut through the ice, sank fathoms into the sea, chaperoned by seals that are not mermaids at all. Else you think this a hoax, know my hand— down here still—please send help.